I upgraded to Leopard this past Saturday. Generally a good thing — I love Quick Look and use it far more than I ever thought I would, and I’m a big fan of Spaces as well (Linux window managers have had the same functionality for years, and I’ve missed it terribly — but no longer!). And if my WD Passport external hard drive weren’t acting up, I’d probably be in love with Time Machine, too.

The main downside for me right now is that Blender is now really sluggish, and it blurs the screen at times. I’m not sure what’s up with that — other people seem to be reporting that it runs on fine on Leopard.

Yesterday I pulled open my development site (hosted locally) to work on Blank Slate, but got a forbidden error message. It was rather worrisome (and my Internet connection was acting up at the time), but then I found Working with PHP 5 in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and it solved that problem. Phew. :)

In other news, I finally bought a TextMate license yesterday. Now I just need to immerse myself in the keystroke documentation until I’m as fast as I was in Vim…

Technorati Tags: Apple, Leopard, PHP, TextMate, Vim

I’m probably switching back to Vim. Not for everything, mind you, but I’ve found that my fingers miss the speed of Vim’s keystrokes. Perhaps it’s possible to be as fast in TextMate, but it’s been a while now and I still feel like I’m slugging through quicksand. And yet TextMate is pretty darn cool, and I like it a lot. I suspect I’ll go back and forth. There’s nothing quite like the buzz I get from whipping through code at the speed of light in Vim. ;)

Where does Vim fall short? My experience has been that it didn’t used to integrate well with other Mac apps (clipboard stuff), and Unicode support wasn’t all that great. It seems to work fine with the clipboard, and apparently Unicode is up to par as well (but I haven’t tested it yet). My bet is that some of the small frustrations I ran into with Vim back a few months ago were all configurable — meaning, I could’ve gotten what I wanted by changing the configuration.

Not that I can see the future, of course :), but I think I’ll probably end up using Vim for everything except perhaps Rails coding and stuff involving Unicode. We’ll see…

Technorati Tags: Vim, TextMate, Rails

Finally started doing some Ruby coding today. I’m writing a pedigree parser that takes an XML pedigree and outputs it to HTML, and so the natural first step was to see what Ruby’s XML capabilities are. REXML is cool. I’ve done a fair amount of XML work in .NET at my job, and in spite of the differences, I was able to figure the basics out in a very short amount of time. That’s more a statement about how good Ruby and REXML are than it is one about my skill as a coder. :) Anyway, I seem to have heard about other XML libraries in Ruby (which makes me wonder if REXML has hidden deficiencies that I’m unaware of), but I won’t worry about those until I reach REXML’s limits.

And Ruby’s a delight to code in. I think I’ve grokked the block concept (myarray.each { |e| print e }, for example) and iterators and stuff like that. Now it’s just a matter of taking all those ingredients in my head and baking them into some real code. Then the mastery will start to come, and that’s when the real fun starts. I want to start coding DSLs (domain-specific languages) in Ruby, by the way… Mmm.

Can I just say that I love TextMate? Being able to run Ruby code straight from the editor (both via ⌘-R for the separate results window and through Control-Shift-E right in the editor window) is amazingly nice. Sure, other IDEs have that as well, but TextMate is delicious and fun to use.

Technorati Tags: Ruby, XML, REXML, TextMate

I’m reading through the TextMate Basics Tutorial on Sereniki. It’s pretty good, and wow, TextMate really is cool. (I’ll start reading through the manual once I finish this tutorial.) Anyway, I noticed that there’s no syntax highlighting for Lilypond — that may have to change. :) It depends on how time-consuming it’d be, though…

Technorati Tags: TextMate, Lilypond

I’ve switched to TextMate for my work development (which is mostly HTML, CSS, and XSLT at the moment, plus Ruby and Python for Beyond). And I’m liking it. Granted, I haven’t read the manual yet and so my fingers are really missing vi keystrokes, but I’m going to learn the TextMate keystrokes. Before long I’ll be setting the keyboard on fire. :) Anyway, the project management stuff is really cool, as are bundles and column editing and I’m sure everything else I haven’t discovered yet. But soon, soon… As far as TextMate’s minimalism goes (interface-wise), that’s fine by me. Vi is minimalist, too, and that’s what I’ve used for years. Make no mistake — I still love vi — but since it’s not a Mac-native app, I sometimes run into issues (with Unicode, for example). TextMate seems easier in that respect, less a pain. We’ll see how it goes, and if it continues to be a good experience, then when the 30 day trial runs out I’ll be buying a license.

Technorati Tags: TextMate, Ruby, Python